ANALOGIC TO DIGITAL CONVERSION

In the depth of a wardrobe, I recently found a hidden package of old black and white photographs. Yes, revealed photos, the old photos that today are known as analogic. These were the photographs that I made during which I think I could consider my first contact with abandoned, or almost abandoned, villages, my first approach to rural abandonment. These are the photos of my trip to Madruedano, a small and lost town in the province of Soria, in 1984.

On that trip it was the first time that I used a SLR camera, a Zenith E, with Industar lens of 50 mm f3.5 and a selenium photometer. It was a rude, but reliable Russian camera, which I started to handle with almost no technical knowledge about photographic technique. I barely knew how to choose the optimum values of diaphragm and speed and it is in sight. The photos themselves, technically are a disaster, and being objective, I must admit that they are worth little or nothing, but nevertheless for me they have a very high sentimental value, reason that has moved me to upload them to this section of the web dedicated to rural abandonment. Worth your consideration as kilometer 0 in my photographs of abandonment, my starting point.

But if the technical parameters seem to be that they were not the most accurate, looking at the photos, I must add that the development process done seems to be that it should not be the best either, so there is a clear deterioration in the state of the current image. With the intention of improving those photographs I have submitted them to a modest editing process whereby, in a very discreet way, something has improved. More than editing, it could be said that it has been a process of graphic restoration.

The restoration process was really simple. I selected the images that had the best presence. I scanned them one by one and saved them as a jpeg file. Later, I imported them in Lightroom and from here, with hardly any retouching, I edited them using Google's Silver Fx Pro. I did several tests by using the control points of this program and the result was not bad. I made a new development attempt applying the zone development established by Ansel Adams, modifying and improving the extreme blacks and whites, and it seems that they improved a bit more. However, since the quality of the original images was not very good, the final quality of the images shown on the web is not a marvel either. I couldn’t do any miracle. Really different than RAW photographs taken during my last trips to abandonment, with a good camera, Nikon D7100, and an excellent lens, Sigma 17-50 f2.8, recently edited, whose quality exceeds those first photos in a very remarkable way, made with my first SLR camera, more than basic. For all the above, if any criticism fits and someone wants to do it, I pray to be not too hard with photos that appear in this section.

Come in, look and I hope you enjoy with these old and restored photographs.